Semi-polling based interrupt mitigation for high performance packet processing

Interrupt-driven systems can be collapsed due to frequent NIC interrupts under heavy network traffic. To mitigate this problem, a high-performance communication mechanism SBIM based on real-time OS RTLinux is designed and implemented. A new concept of semi-polling is presented. With state-based semi-polling mechanism and lightweight buffering algorithm, interrupt frequency is reduced and the performance for short packet is significantly ameliorated. The experimental results indicate that the throughputs of SBIM for 64byte and 1500byte packets are 394Mbps and 895Mbps in Gigabit Ethernet environments, which show that the performance of SBIM surpasses that of other mechanisms.

Interrupt-driven systems can be collapsed due to frequent NIC interrupts under heavy network traffic. To mitigate this problem, a high-performance communication mechanism SBIM based on real-time OS RTLinux is designed and implemented. A new concept of semi-polling is presented. With state-based semi-polling mechanism and lightweight buffeting algorithm, interrupt frequency is reduced and the performance for short packet is significantly ameliorated. The experimental results indicate that the throughputs of SBIM for 64byte and 1500byte packets are 394Mbps and 895Mbps in Gigabit Ethernet environments, which show that the performance of SBIM surpasses that of other mechanisms